The End of Bachman (Teresa Bachman)

I took the poems from this "era" and in 97 - 03 did some extensive rewriting for my Finite collection.

My themes of victimhood and sorting through childhood sorrows must have been a necessary step in my process--although tiring even to my self.

A Witness in the House
© 1994 Teresa Bachman
Dedicated to Glenda

I Explain About This First Item In My Collection
I keep a pair of eyes in my desk
as a novelty item to impress co-workers.
The pupils are brown, and set against cotton
appear dark as obsidian.

I wanted blue eyes, or turquoise.
Something my boyfriend would have worn in his head.
Transactions in America are bogged in red-ape
and the prices too high for a simple knick-knack.
So few are willing to do without their organs.
These eyes are from Sri Lank
where peasants starve and sell cheap to the first buyer.

The Buddhists, I hear, are encouraged to give their eyes
up at death so others can see through their enlightenment.
I heaven this act seats them closer to Buddha.
I used to wonder if that donor could see, from there
to here, through these eyes, and what she thought
of this view: a glass box buried among desk papers
and sometimes my face.

Jensen, in the corner office, keeps a heart
he bought black market, which means the donor
was still alive. That purchase fed the donor’s family
for a few more weeks; the merchant for a year.

I intend to add a brain to my collection.
I am in no hurry and will wait until the donor is dead.
Jensen is a bastard and displaying black market goods
won’t move him up the ladder. The C.E.O.
gave one lung to his son and values life.

In some states this hobby is illegal.
There instead they continue to stuff and mount animals.
I had an iguana and an aardvark on my fireplace mantle.
I was younger then and had no real taste in collecting.

My Feet

These are my feet. They are distant cousins,
unknown, someone to ponder, to invite over
in rare occurrence. These are my ham strings
and my calves. These are my thighs.
They were once pretty ladies. Once
they were social and danced every round;
high-kicking, sweet-hugging, soft ladies.
These are my feet. They have an invisible bruise,
a tenderness, and I won’t walk without pain.

These are my hands. I employ them.
In exchange for lotion and polish and glittering rings
they type, type, type a sound like money to my ears.
My ears, they sit up here, also ringed and perfumed
listening for the extraordinary. They like a good story,
a piece of slander, a bit of gristle to turn.
They are a gossip without a mouth.

This is my mouth. It is too busy breathing to gossip.
Too busy eating to tell a tall tale. too busy smoking
and twisting and turning, too busy yawning and coughing
and keeping closed against telling too much.
It takes things in and lets nothing out.
This is my throat. It used to hurt and was decked
in red and raw white. It tried to kill me
so the doctor shot it with penicillin for years
until that ache moved outward. This is my neck.
It carries my pain. When it carries my pain
it keeps me from lifting my head from turning my head,
from seeing anything but down.
These are my shoulders. They share in the pain
and hate me for giving them too much to carry.

These are my arms. I can tell because they are hairy.
Because I am German and hairy and remember the boy
in junior high who combed these arms to tease me.
They are hairy and scaly from dryness and are sore
from misuse and from employing the hands without them.

Oh. I am lying. These look like my feet.
But they are shoes. They are a lost pair of shoes.
They are shoes I lost in a mountain of mud where an office
now stands. The baby toes twist and crowd the toes
beside them. These aren’t my feet. They are shoes
too small, too saddle, I had to wear an extra year.
They are teased and maligned and they aren’t my feet.
They are bad shoes.
These look like my feet. But they are shoes.
I camouflage the bad shoes with prime Italian leather.
I hide them in stockings, under long, baggy pants.
I take pride in the cut and the smell of the leather,
but they still aren’t my feet. My feet are buried
in the foundation where an office now stands.

These look like my hands. They aren’t.
They are prostitutes and I have paid for them
and I will work them to death.
They are a statistic, a drowned whore
who surfaces years later when I will be gone.
I don’t even know what these hands have touched.
I found them gesturing when they were meant
to be praying or fretting the guitar. Gesturing
because they weren’t long enough to straddle an octave
these hands, wanting to touch. Not my hands.
I have lifted them from the street
and will work them to death.

This isn’t my belly. This jelly mold of flesh
and ripple and wave. My belly is tight and small
and buried somewhere beneath this. My belly
has been hidden for years. Every month it rages
at the cages built around it and under and above it
so I know it exists. But this belly isn’t it.
I have caged my belly, wild beast that it is
holy alter that it is, inviting pillow, center of power.

This isn’t my back. Yes, I have branded it
and tattooed it like cattle. yes I have set it
to roam the range. It isn’t mine.
I have never seen it. It walks away from me
and is lost in the crowd. It looks like anyone else.
These aren’t my legs. They may lift me and move me,
but they no longer dance me. The knees aren’t mine.
They are bony rocks set on my legs. They look
like my mothers and are always moving ahead of me.

These aren’t my bones. And these aren’t my veins.
These arteries run to and from someone else’s heart.
I have not set this breathing in motion, these mechanics
of living. Something beyond me willed this, not I.
This isn’t my butt. It is large. I sit on it all day and pretend I own it.
At night I give it a home. Mostly I ignore it.
This isn’t my cunt. Once it belonged to a man
and it was a doorway he used to climb in
because he wanted to own me from the inside out.
I won that game and have sent my body away.

These aren’t my feet. They are a pair of shoes.
I wish they would run away, want them to grow wings,
to fly away. They aren’t my feet. They aren’t my feet.
No. They are not my feet.


Retelling

The bones of the fields reassemble
into skeletons, ash into flesh.
Soldiers return home, wives waiting,
sheets pulled back, roasts set upon linen.
Cattle springs from the table and all the couples
copulating unfurl and are children, climb back
into their mother’s wombs, their mother’s wombs,
and into theirs.

Martyred heretics rise from the grave.
The Koran disintegrates in Mohammed’s hands
and Kore guards her temple at Mecca.
Christ descends from the right hand of god,
unhinges from the cross and no man is saved.
The Buddha sleeps, unenlightened.
Prophets return to the wasteland,
commandments erase from stone, man is lawless.

One dove flies tail end first into Noah’s arc
and god breaks peace with man.
The springs of the deep and the flood gates o heaven
open and close. Waters recede.
Those who breathe life through nostrils breath again.

Methuselah is alive, walking the earth.
Cian pulls back from striking Abel.
Adam restores rule to Eve
and Eve is the link between spirit and sex
and Eve recovers her body and bares
or doesn’t bare according to her own need.
We return to the garden, walk naked,
eat freely of the fruit.

Straight From the Dance
© 1994
Teresa Bachman
(none here)

The Accomplished Thumb
© 1996
Teresa Bachman

Further Damage, 7 poems for my mother

1.
I don’t remember the abduction
only a sensation of arms or tentacles probing
as though skin were no barrier
to my lungs, brains, ovaries,
a slimy touch descending
the way one reaches through a hologram
or steam; through an image, not a fact.
I can not prove
these near-memories. Surroundings
dim and fade, faces and noise
both foreign and forgettable yet indelibly
carried within me. As if an alien
smudged fingerprints, or dropped
some small tool, a pair of scissors,
a microchip, a loose thread.
Evidence buried within me
as if that alien expects
to be found out.

2.
There is a robot wheeling in the attic.
It has pressed my bed sheets in place
secure as swaddling. It has ripped
webs from the corners, shined windows
clear as diamonds. Unsatisfied
it waits at the stair tops
and will find some way to press me flat,
to remove every living thing from my veins.
My mother in the living room rocks
in her mother’s rocker. The one
I carved my own name into.
Transparent and amber as the whisky
she’s been sucking down all day, Mother cries
that she’d like to stop it, the robot,
whirling upstairs.
It is too durable. The mechanical parts rust proof.
Her own tears have proven this.

3.
Visiting my sister, my mother awoke
just after midnight, and
losing her way in the hallway
walked past the bathroom
through the living room and out
the sliding door. The moon
was especially bright, calling her
as porch lights call moths.
It’s seas visible: Mare Nubium, Mare Imbrium,
the Sea of Rains. And as water begets water,
my mother lifted her flannel gown, squatted,
and peed on the lawn.

4.
If love took a form I fear it would be liquid
and like rain on the roof would insist a path
splitting wide every failed seam
I could say this is love
which carves clefts, which grinds me into silt
or perhaps what Mother has given me
is best described as wind
loosening the droughted ground until my roots,
exposed, snap and I am somersaulting in her breath.
Her love can blast down an entire forest.
She lays the world to ruin
wearing that smile other mother wear
tucking the pristine sheets to their children’s chins.

5.
This fisted heart, centered between
useless arms, sucks and pups its red air.
What use is it, shaped like this, like a child’s
crayoned caricature, an arrow stuck
through its center?

When I say I give it to her
I mean that I have ripped it clear
of arteries and ventricles
and have set it on the butcher table
to halve anyway she likes.

Mother wears a white smoke to display
my blood all the more morbidly, sticks
her stethoscope into the pulsing mass
in order to confirm it’s dead.
She is curious but cautious
and knows well in advance what she plans for me.

Let the other children turn out well
or poorly. I am the one
who will never surprise her, will never
take the heart back and run away.

6.
Before these final stages her hands
could be gentle, and on a self-less night
would roll my limp hair
into an unlikely halo of pink cushions.
I was a good girl, motionless
as her porcelain doll
tissue-wrapped and moth-balled
in the storage trunk. Sometimes
because she was quiet I would read aloud poems
and imagine that in-between her taking up
those damp strands
as though stringing glass beads
I imagined she was listening.
The air about us felt holy, delicate,
and we were so fragile,
lace doilies
or two snowflakes falling
though the ground below, warm and hard

it can not further damage us now.

7.
The last noon I saw her
she was already drunk and dumb
and eating sardines.
Juice sluiced from her mouth
down her chin into a sepia spittle.
I would like to have laid out my life
on her table as a deck of cards, explaining
each, would have welcomed
her own translation, and have it mean something
coherent. I would like to have said
we shared something bad
and had turned it good.

I waved my hands before her eyes and expected
the matched pupils to follow as mine followed
her fluttering hands when I was cribbed.
She may well have been dead.
And with this the whole world died.
It fell from me as skin will
sack-empty and seam threads pulled loose;
a future denied possibilities,
hope cut clear of the heart,
so that I knew my whole life of reaching
and wishing, always wishing
for her touch, all of it was a lie
washed clean away in her spit.

Notches
© 1997
Teresa Bachman

(none here)